Comment by mikepurvis

Yes, that's fair. I wouldn't be trying to use Nix at all if I was wanting to depend on stuff outside of it— fortunately nixpkgs already has decent coverage in the scientific computing space, so most of what we needed for a ROS/robotics application was present, and the remainder wasn't too bad to just package ourselves.

That said, I think the node story overall is still pretty rough. There are several competing tools/workflows each with different tradeoffs. My frontend team did a brief evaluation and basically just noped out of it— there's so much tooling in the node world that just gets you directly from your lockfiles right to a deployable container, it's harder to see the value of a Nix closure as an intermediate build object; the case is a lot less clear for it than for, say, Python or C++ stuff.